You have been taught to be curious about needs. Do prospects need your solution? Are they in ‘pain’? The moment — the very moment — you hear that a ‘need’ matches your solution, you’re off and running. And you (wrongly) assume you have a prospect.

STOP TRYING TO SELL SO SOON

Here are some erroneous assumptions:

• you just need to get in front of someone, and once they understand the brilliance of your solution they will be buyers;
• if your solution matches their need, all you have to do is sell properly (and be interested, caring, smart, yada yada) and they will buy;
• you need to educate your buyer because until they understand your solution they won’t understand the value;
• you need to understand everything you can about your buyer so you’ll sound intelligent and engender trust and can position your solution accordingly.

I’m here to tell you that all of the above are false. A buyer cannot buy (learn all of the issues involved in the decision to buy in my latest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) until

1. all of the members of the Buying Decision Team have put in their two cents about what they need a solution to do;
2. they know that a beloved vendor, or their internal resource (their own tech team, for example) cannot solve their problem;
3. they get the necessary buy-in from everyone who will touch the solution;
4. they know know how to resolve their problem without major disruption.

Here is the hardest thing for a seller to understand and believe: the only thing you will ever know about your buyer is how their need might be served by your solution from the one or two people you’re talking to.

THE REASONS YOU’LL NEVER KNOW YOUR BUYER

Using the sales model alone (i.e. without putting Buying Facilitation® on the front end) you will never know the following:

• what is going on internally, behind-the-scenes, that has created and maintained their problem, and the reason it hasn’t been resolved until now.
• the criteria they, as Buying Decision Team, will use to choose a solution or a vendor.
• how they will go about determining who should be on the Buying Decision Team and what internal political factors bias these choices.
• what sort of havoc your solution will play with the status quo if the folks inside don’t figure out how to resolve the internal systems issues first.

Buyers do not want your solution. They want to resolve a business problem. Your solution is the last thing they want. I recently heard a VP of Sales Ops for a tech company tell me that they had a very long sales cycle, but there was only one buyer (the CIO) and he couldn’t figure out what took him so long.

He totally forgot that there are several departments that must buy-in to new technology; that the CIO undoubtedly delegated all or part of the solution; that the internal tech guys would fight tooth and nail before allowing yet another tech solution to come in and make a mess of what they have in place.

If he used Buying Facilitation®, he could:

• teach the prospect how to put together a Buying Decision Team on the first call.
• lead the buyer through all of the systemic change management issues that he’d need to address to create an openning and willingness for the folks to bring in something new — they would understand how their jobs would change and be ok with that.
• help prospects understand how all of the current and new technology would fit and work together;
• help prospects understsand the upsides and downsides of the learning curve, and how to mitigate or get buy-in around the learning curve.

You do not know how your buyer will manage any of that. You merely know what you think they need. And if that were enough, you’d be closing a helluva lot more sales.

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Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to learn all of the issues buyers face when they are considering a purchase.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

You think know your buyer. You don’t. is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

REALLY? BUYERS BUY BECAUSE THEY ARE IN PAIN? REALLY?

I found the article ruefully humorous. Here are some of the smartest business minds in the country who have fallen victim to the conventional hype that buyers must discover their pain in order to be ready to buy. Indeed, in this article they suggest that you provoke them into buying: “Provocation-based selling helps customers see their competitive challenges in a new light that makes addressing specific painful problems unmistakenly urgent.”

How silly. This goes back to the age-old pain-principle.  According to the authors, if a vendor can identify a process critical for the buyer in the current environment (and this assumes the buyer hasn’t figured this out) and developed a ‘compelling point of view on how it was broken and what it meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to the solution’ then the buyer will be provoked into a purchase.

Haven’t we been doing this for decades? And our success rate has been…..  7%.

SALES TREATS A PROBLEM AS IF IT WERE AN ISOLATED EVENT

Think about this for a moment. Targeting pain as the reason to make a sale assumes that:

1. the buyer or company doesn’t recognize the severity of the problem they have;
2. the seller knows better than the prospect the ins-and-outs of the problem, causes, choices, and internal politics to choosing the timing on a fix;
3. they haven’t tried to fix this before, or aren’t in the process of choosing a fix, or have a work-around for it that’s good-enough for now;
4. there aren’t a whole lotta systems issues tied up in the status quo that would need to be resolved first – or that these can be resolved immediately;
5. an outsider (and a stranger at that) can manipulate [Oops. Sorry. Provoke.] their way in to a buyer’s environment, have the answer, and expect to be trusted, believed, or listened to, and that everyone on the Buying Decision Team is sitting and waiting for someone to show up so that everything currently in place can be dismantled because SuperSeller has appeared.

For those of you who have been reading my posts for years, you know what I’m going to say. Until or unless a buyer recognizes and manages all of the back-end, private, behind-the-scenes issues they need to address to get the buy-in to make a change, they will do nothing.

If I provoked you, could I get you to go to the gym more? I can certainly make a case for it. What about changing your hairstyle? Can I provoke you into changing your selling style?

CAN I PROVOKE YOU INTO LEARNING BUYING FACILITATION(TM)?

I can make an amazing case for you to be using Buying Facilitation™! Indeed – I can triple your sales, halve your sales cycle, and get rid of all objections. I really can (lots of testimonials). Soooo can I provoke you? Can I show you numbers that you’re not tracking? Oh. I’ve done that. Can I explain how managing the buying decision journey will turn leads into prospects on the first call, and teach them how to close a couple of calls later, with no meetings, proposals, or appointments? Oh. I”ve done that. Geesh. Haven’t I provoked you enough… and you’re not buying?

Please. Continuing to focus the sales effort on different ways to get a buyer to take action, rather than add the capability of assisting them in managing their entire pre-sales buying journey, makes no sense. A purchase is not an isolated situation, but demands a systemic approach to change management.

We all know that the sales model is horribly broken, and yields very poor results. Why keep finding ways to push harder and harder? The definition of insanity is…..   And we all know systems theory: every system will maintain its status quo (homeostasis) until or unless the system knows how to shift without disruption and will easily incorporate the change. Hence the failure of sales.

Stop trying to provoke, push, get an appointment, understand needs, be in relationship, get in the door or to the top, be an advisor, be a consultant – all of that is just a Trojan Horse to make a sale. Be a real consultant. Put on a GPS hat and be the lead dog in helping your prospect manage their change issues first so they get buy-in from the Buying Decision Team. Then there is no need to be provocative.

Just saying…

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Choose to learn one of the new skills of Buying Facilitation™: our Learning Accelerators are designed to help you upgrade any of your current sales skills.

Or, listen to an MP3 of Sharon Drew using Buying Facilitation™ on real calls.

Provocation-based selling:proving pain does not close a sale is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

At the moment, you’ve got a lot of names, leads, and prospects. But depending on your sales model – just sales folks, or using marketing automation, lead scoring, and telesales people to choose the best prospects to hand over to sales – you are closing between 1-7% of all names/leads.

For ’total sales performance‘, let’s add in a skill set to help buyers navigate through the back-end, behind-the-scenes decisions they must make before they can buy. Because with all of the technology in the world, with all of the prospects in the world, and with all of the Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0 capability, we are still losing a large number of prospects. And neither sales nor marketing automation address the backend issues buyers must manage offline.

Someone recently said to me: “You’re still flogging that Buying Facilitation™ stuff?” My response: “Sure. You still flogging that sales stuff?”

SALES, ALONE, ONLY MANAGES 10% OF THE BUYING DECISION

I see Buying Facilitation™ as addressing the buyer’s private and internal journey, like a 1-2 punch. First, help the buyer manage the back-end of their buying decision – those people, relationship, political, strategic, and historic issues they must manage before they can buy - then, do the sales.

Just as you wouldn’t buy a house until your family got together to figure out their criteria for moving, for a new house, and until the bank said you could borrow money and the realtor told you your house would be relatively easy to sell, so a buyer absolutely cannot purchase anything until all of the Buying Decision Team agrees and adds their two cents.

Until or unless you address the front-end of the buyer’s decision criteria and internal change issues that have nothing to do with need or solution or vendor choice a prospect will not make a purchase. I often remind people of the magic 80% number: the number of prospects who will buy a solution like yours within 2 years (and leave behind a trail of dead sales people) but from a different vendor.

Why don’t they buy it from you? Why aren’t they buying sooner? Because they cannot. Because the sales model only manages the needs assessment and solution placement and does nothing to help them manage the mystery of the buying decision journey. Because there would be too much fallout. Because people would quit, or relationships severely compromised, or companies and strategic partnerships would be harmed.

Total sales performance is not just focused on the solution placement end of the buying decision. Add Buying Facilitation™ to the front end, and change your close rate to 40%.

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To learn more about Buying Facilitation™, read sample chapters from my two most recent books (Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) on www.buyingfacilitation.com

To read about tactical things you can do to help buyers buy more, quicker, and without objections or time delays, read Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.

Or listen to Sharon Drew make prospecting calls: MP3

Total Sales Performance: Buying Facilitation® plus Sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Why do we assume buyers are, um, stupid? Because it’s obvious to us they should buy. From where we stand, it seems we have THE perfect fit – the right solution at the right price, filling the right need, and the right relationship.

But we consistently forget that a buyer’s problem is not an isolated event, and it sits within the buyer’s environment – their system, if you will – all mashed up with a bunch of unknown and unknowable other elements that not only hold it in place, but maintain it daily.

And we walk in as Super Saviours, assuming we are, as Dr. Seuss says in The Sneetches The Fixxit Up Chappie.

But it’s so much more complex – even for a very simple sale. Because every single purchase is a Change Management issue. Every single one. And, so different from what we perceive, buyers are doing perfectly well as they are – or they would have fixed their problem already.

So, no, it’s not a money problem, or a competition problem, or a differentiation problem. And where prospects go is not to find a better price or visit your competition. They go to the next department, or an old vendor, or the tech group, to see if they can get buy-in for change.

Because until or unless buyers get agreement from everyone and everything that touches the Identified Problem, and would be in some way stressed if something different entered the system, they will do nothing. Regardless of their need, or your stellar, and (of course) perfect solution.

It’s  not about you, your solution, your relationship, your price, your care, your presentation, your appointment, your charisma, or having the perfect fit.

Until or unless buyers recognize and manage all of the internal issues that not only created their Identified Problem but keep it in place daily, and until they all buy-in to whatever change will happen when something new enters, they will do absolutely nothing.

Check out my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. It will explain what’s going on and what you can do about it. Then you can stop telling your manager that you’ve got prospects in the pipeline, and you’ll have a much better understanding of where and how you and your solution will fit in.

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Why Do We Blame Buyers? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

These sales folks are long-term professionals, responsible for millions of dollars of business annually. Yet they are discovering wholly new responses and possibilities for starting client relationships.

What are they doing differently from what they used to do? They are directing their efforts to supporting the off-line issues prospects have to address before they are in a position to consider making a buying decision. They are not using sales techniques. They are not gathering data, or understanding needs, or pitching. But their results are far more successful than if they were selling.

My client sells JIT learning solutions to large numbers of users in corporations, universities, and government agencies. Usually, their sales cycles are long because of the different types of decision makers involved: L&D, HR, technology, Training. Now, using Buying Facilitation, with a single cold call, they are learning how to efficiently lead buyers through their normally confusing journey through internal buy-in for change.

Here is what my clients are noticing on these cold calls:

1. time: cold calls are going from an average of 4 minutes to 24 minutes.
2. acceptance: without asking for a meeting, they are being asked to come in for face-to-face meetings in order to meet the whole Buying Decision Team.
3. respect: within the first 15 minutes of the cold call, their opinion is being sought and prospects are asking how to best bring my client’s solution into their environment.
4. creativity: the prospects are opening to new possibilities that they hadn’t considered, with initial plans to use my client’s solution as part of their internal resources.
5. rapport: laughter, fun, teasing, collaboration. Within minutes they are in a “We Space.” It’s delightful to hear.
6. numbers: they are going from getting 10-15% agreement for a face  meeting, to being asked to come in and present about 40% of the time (with no numbers yet available as to how that will increase by the second call).

FACILITATING DECISIONS

Are we selling? Well, no. But the buyers are being given the tools to put together the right decision teams and make plans to design internal change initiatives that include my client’s product. On the first call.

By helping buyers manage their off-line decision-making and helping them understand and consider how to welcome and manage change, they are opening the door to a sale, entering the buyer’s environment far earlier than they could if they were selling, and becoming part of the Buying Decision Team on a cold call. They are indeed collapsing the sales cycle.

Most of all, they are truly serving their prospects and helping them discover their own excellence. If we can’t help our buyers achieve excellence, we’ve got nothing to sell anyway.

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p.s. If you want to contact my client Peter Casebow to find out how he is finding the change, and how it is affecting his business, email him.

A Case Study In Buying Facilitation® is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com